


Things Not Everyone Sees

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood, Flash Fic, Gen, Monsters, So is the One in the Closet, The Monster Under the Bed is a Lesbian, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Trick or Treat: Treat, because it's adorable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-23 19:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21086843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: No matter what her parents say Emily knows that monsters are real. It would be fine if there was just one in her room, but there's two and now she's caught in the middle of something.





	Things Not Everyone Sees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smarky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smarky/gifts).

Emily lay in bed, trying to ignore the scratching sounds coming from under her bed. Her mom and dad told her it was just mice and told her not to worry.

Grandma, when she visited, heard it too and said it wasn’t mice, but it wasn’t anything to be afraid of. The house she’d said, was built on a thin place where things that you usually only saw out of the corner of your eye could slip through, but that they were mostly harmless.

Then mom and dad had yelled at Grandma for telling stories and she hadn’t said anything more about it.

She believed Grandma, even if she wasn’t sure how harmless the thing under her bed was. It hid away, occasionally reaching out with a spindly, scaly hand like a bird’s foot, snatching up dropped pieces of Halloween candy and the occasional cup of tea left on the floor. It would return the teacups, carefully cleaned, but Emily resented it for the candy.

It was very shy, whispering to her in a hissing, sing-song voice, usually questions that Emily pretended not to hear.

She might have answered if it was the only monster, but it wasn’t. There was a soft blobby thing resembling a cross between a melting snowman and a jellyfish. It had a thin, smiling mouth, two dark smudges for eyes and dozens, or maybe hundreds of little branching arms that dangled below it in a fringe.

Unlike the thing under the bed, this one didn’t stay in one place, humming to itself as it drifted around the room like it was dancing.

When she called for her parents the thing would vanish into the closet and fold down on the floor, disguising itself as a rumpled sheet or a pile of clothing.

Most the thing under her bed’s questions were about the blobby thing.

“Doesn’t she have the prettiest voice?”

“Have you ever seen someone with so many arms?”

“Do you see how she dances?”

And eventually, “Would you give this to her?”

That question was accompanied by a clawed hand rising up to offer an envelope which Emily recognized as coming from the missing package of stationary that her Grandma had sent her. Her parents had thought that she’d misplaced it, but they were wrong, it had been stolen by the monster under the bed.

“Please!” The thing hissed.

“If you give me back the rest of the stationary,” Emily said, trying to decide if it was a ploy to get her to stick her hand out so the monster under the bed could snatch her away. Probably not since its arm was long enough to easily reach her.

“You weren’t using it,” the monster said sullenly, “I need it.”

Emily ask what it needed stationary for, because the answer was obvious, to write letters.

“Fine,” Emily snatched the letter as quickly as she could, just in case the monster decided to try something. In the process she caught a glimpse of the writing on the envelope, squirmy, slimy looking lines that crawled like caterpillars if she stared too long. In the dark it was hard to tell, but she suspected that it was written in pink, from her favorite pen that had also gone missing, “What now?”

“Give it to her,” the monster under the bed whispered.

Emily looked at the floating blob. There was no way it didn’t know that she was there.

“Here,” she said quietly, so that her parents wouldn’t hear. Showing them the letter would be proof that the under her bed monster was real, but she didn’t want to make it mad, “This is for you.”

The blob’s smudge eyes went perfectly round, its smile vanishing to a small line as it looked her way.

“A letter for me?” Its voice was distant and hollow, as though it was at the bottom of a well, “I wonder who it’s from.”

Emily shrugged, nearly dropping the letter when all of those branching little arms reached out and took it from her.

The smudges vanished as it blinked, “Whoever wrote this has very pretty hand writing.”

It tore open the envelope with a quick swipe of one hand and began to read, humming thoughtfully as it did.

When it finished it folded the letter up and tucked it away some place that Emily couldn’t quite see between the ruffle-like layers of its form.

“She seems very nice,” it said cheerfully, “I’ll have to write back to her. Will you deliver my letter the next time you see her?”

A triumphant hiss came from beneath the bed.

“Sure,” Emily said quietly, knowing that if she tried to tell her parents about any of this they’d tell her that she had an overactive imagination to be delivering letters between her imaginary friends.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope that you didn't mind creepy, but adorable monsters, I read your letter and that combined with this prompt gave me this idea.


End file.
